Q&A with The Brothers Bloom director Rian Johnson

Mark Ruffalo, Rian Johnson, Rachel Weisz, and Adrien Brody, on the set of Brothers Bloom

Rian Johnson established himself as a master stylist four years ago with his first movie, Brick, a neo-noir set in high-school, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. As is customary, Mother Hollywood rewarded his freshman success with a bigger budget, bigger cast, and a creative carte blanche for a more ambitious second film. The result is the The Brothers Bloom, a conman movie starring Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo and Rachel Weisz. In the process of writing his third movie, a darker time-travel tale, Johnson spoke to VF Daily about the debt the brothers Bloom owe to the brothers Marx, among other things.

The hardest part of writing a con-artist movie, I would imagine, would be figuring out how to fool an audience the way your protagonists have been fooling everybody else.

Well, in a way, yeah. But that was the kind of the aspect of it I was least focused on with Bloom. The origin of Bloom was actually the notion of doing a very character-based conman movie. But that was its own specific challenge, within this genre, just because it’s a genre where, because the audience is expecting the payoff to be kind of a cool twist at the end, they come into it with a certain amount of emotional distance from the characters. And overcoming that, and doing a conman film that was structured around the journey of this character rather than the classically structured ‘gotcha’ twist at the end, was the challenge for me.So you made it character-driven. The core of the film is this unbreakable bond between these two very different brothers.

Right, right.

Do you have a brother?

Yeah, I have two brothers, actually.

Did you base the film on them at all?

No, no. Luckily, my relationships with my two brothers are much healthier than the one between Bloom and Stephen . It seemed to me that kind of an instant way to buy back a little bit of that automatic emotional distance I was talking about earlier was to bring the element of family into it. Have them be brothers And then for me, I have a very big family, and we were all—I have like twenty younger cousins, and we were all really close growing up. Yeah, it’s a huge, huge family. And my cousin, you know, Nathan, did the music for the movie, and his brother Zach drew the illustrations for the film.

Sort of a cottage industry, then.

We're keeping it in the family. But just the tone of the movie, to a large extent, for me, comes from hanging out with family, the intimacy of it. Humor-wise, it’s something I’ve always connected with the Marx Brothers movies. For some reason, their films remind me of how it feels to hang out with my family, oddly enough.

And you said you had a healthy relationship with them?

Good question, yeah. I guess I need to explain that. By that I mean the feeling that there’s a level of controlled chaos going on. But that’s coupled with this odd feeling of security. And with the Marx Brothers movies, for example, that's—maybe that’s it: maybe it’s the fact that it feels like there’s all that there’s all this dangerous stuff whizzing around your head, but at the same time you feel kind of safe throughout the whole thing. You almost feel like these brothers are just having a good time and playing. And that weird combination of—obviously anytime you’ve got a family, there’s dangerous stuff in the air, and there’s always going to be emotionally volatile things happening.

Probably especially so because you know that there’s that safety net.

Exactly. It allows you to let those things be in the air. I guess that’s the main aspect of my family that seeps into the movie, I guess.

And there’s that wild variable, which is Rachel Weisz’s eccentric but brilliant rich girl.

Right.

How did you conceive of that character?

Just in terms of the structure, she was kind of the opposite pole of Stephen. You know, it becomes kind of a triangle with Bloom caught in the middle. You know, Stephen builds the hedge maze, Penelope smells the flowers on the hedges. I got a handle on the brothers first, and Penelope’s character was a little tougher to crack for me. And a big part of it is—I kind of intentionally left the character a little undiscovered in my mind and the script, because I knew the only thing that was really going to bring it to life was an amazing. So, I mean, most of, so much of what’s up there is Rachel. But for me, Diane Arbus was one thing that I clicked with that made a lot of—that finally gave Penelope a beating heart for me, in the writing process.

Did Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody develop a bond off the set?

Yeah, they did actually. We shot this over in Eastern Europe, and we were kind of a traveling circus for about three months. We were—and actually, that’s one of the benefits of the—when I say “limited budget,” I guess it’s limited for what’s on the screen, limited compared to big Hollywood movies. For me, this was a huge budget.

Much more than Brick?

Oh, extraordinary, hugely more than Brick. Almost comically more than Brick. But, at the same time, it was limited enough that we weren’t on sound stages building everything. Our production designer, Jim Clay, did an amazing job of using existing locations, and augmenting and dressing them. And so that meant that we were basically just on the road, just going from location to location. Combine that with the fact that we hardly ever repeat a location in the movie, we were traveling a lot. And that had the nice effect of—I guess any time you shoot on location, everyone bonds together a little tighter, just because, you know, you’re not going home at night. Everyone either had to bond or slit each other’s throat.

Like a big family.

Precisely. Nicely put.

You directed the first movie you wrote [Brick]. How did you learn the tricks of the trade?

Oh, I don’t know if I [laughs]

To the extent that you think you did

I don’t really have a good answer. I mean, I feel like anything I know at this point about movies, besides the gargantuan amount that I learned making these two films, my training was mostly just making movies with friends growing up. Just grabbing a video camera, and that’s kind of how I got through high school, basically. You know, hiding behind a video camera. And getting together on the weekend with friends. And that’s what we would do: we would hang out, and we would make a movie. And I never really worked—I never did television, I never really worked doing commercials, or I never had filmmaking as a job, I guess.

And did you go to school for it?

I went to film school at USC. But I feel like—I don’t know, I feel like the benefits of film school are largely in the friendships that you make there. I don't really know that you can learn filmmaking in a classroom.

When you really get down to the work of telling a story on film, there's essentially very little difference between making a movie with a camcorder and your friends and making a movie with a 35-millimeter camera and Adrien Brody. The fundamentals are the same, and the things that you learn doing the one carry directly over into doing the other. The essential honesty that you’re reaching for is the same no matter what format or how many crew members are gathered around you, I guess.

Would you direct a movie that wasn't written by you?

Right now I'm not interested in doing that. I've still got stories that I want to tell, and as long as I’m lucky enough to be in the position where I can keep fooling them into letting me make them, I’ll keep doing that. Who knows, down the line. The well hasn't run dry.